The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  Hilly and I married in 2012, in the shade of trees Jerry planted behind the cabin. Then, in 2014, Jerry was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hilly was pregnant with our first son. The cancer was the type that could have been removed if Jerry had gone in sooner, but he thought of doctors the way he thought of mechanics: the more you saw them, the more they found to fix. So, he prescribed his own health regimen of fresh food and manual labor, radiating the immortality of a tree, for which death is possible, but implausible. Jerry never scheduled the checkup that could have sounded the alarm, and his truancy came with a price: by the time a doctor found it, the cancer was aggressive and inoperable. His oncologist said he might have months to live.

  Almost three years passed. The cancer seeped into his organs and bones, the mutated cells proliferating within him like dandelion seeds blown into a breeze. Metastatic growths were starting to fracture his ribs and spine. The cancer’s progression was excruciatingly painful, but irreversible. Without the need for more ultrasounds, hormone treatments, radiation, or chemo, he stopped making the half-hour drive into Missoula to see his oncologist. Instead, the hospice nurses came to him. It was just as well. Standing here outside his house, a man in his domain, Jerry clearly had no desire to leave.

  Still, the pain was mounting. His first true pain crisis terrified everyone. He was upstairs in his bedroom, writhing and moaning in his bed. When we rushed to him, he looked at us in a panic, sobbing. His eyes flashed like those of a trapped coyote and he said he hoped he would die. For the first time since I had known him, he looked defeated.

  Defeat didn’t come easy for Jerry. One spring afternoon in 1985, a giant, root-rotted cottonwood fell across the cabin right above the front porch, smashing most of the house. The insurance would have paid a contractor to repair it, but Jerry got to work using borrowed house jacks, come-alongs, and a fence stretcher to hoist away the tree and resurrect his home from its bare, broken bones. In the end, he fixed it for a fraction of the insurance claim and used the extra money to pay off his debts. The cabin was as good as new, and it was his cabin, now more than ever.

  Cancer, though, was an act of God that no amount of resilience could negotiate, one that promised only diminishment and then erasure. After that initial pain crisis in his bedroom, a hospice nurse increased the dosage on the portable morphine pump installed directly into his abdomen. As Jerry descended the porch steps that September afternoon in 2016, he cradled the pump in his left hand like a Walkman. Every ten minutes or so it delivered a dose with a whirring noise as if it was fast-forwarding to the next song.

  Jerry scarcely took a Tylenol in his whole life and in the days to come, these narcotics would dull his wits. But on that day his head was clear and his direction was intact. Janet, his second wife for thirty-five years, took his arm. Her body was riddled with cancer, too: a third round of breast cancer had metastasized to her bones. Until recently, they scheduled oncologist appointments together the way they once went to the movies. For a while, they seemed to be lockstep in a race to the end. Now it looked as though Jerry would finish first.

  But before then, he had one bit of business left to attend to in the orchard, one final decision to make before the cancer pulled the rafters down around him. So, with all six of his children and some grandchildren alongside, Jerry slowly stepped down from the porch and started walking.

  II. The Birds

  He used to run. Every morning, for years, he climbed out of bed, laced up his sneakers, and ran out the front door, down this driveway, into the hills and home again in a seven-mile loop. But a lifetime of movement had worn away the cartilage in his left knee, so by now he walked with a limp. Janet spent years trying to persuade him to get a replacement, and we all chimed in to bolster the case. You walk so much, we’d tell him, why do it in pain?

  Now that was no longer a concern. We watched Jerry walk with his customary cadence, listing from left to right like a windshield wiper.

  He walked along river rocks that he set into the earth years ago as a driveway to the outbuilding he called the Honey House, where the family—Jerry, Janet, and all the kids—extracted honey from their hives. In 2012, before Hilly and I got married, Jerry started unearthing each of these stones, clearing the grass around them, and resetting them into the ground, where they looked brand-new. There are hundreds of stones and the job took all summer, but he approached it the way he tackled every task: with daily, incremental work. He applied the same strategy to writing his stories and novels, pruning trees, oil painting, and learning French. In the case of these stones, he knew the grass would grow back between them within a few seasons, but that didn’t matter. Like Sisyphus, Jerry rolled his rock up the hill. If it cost him some sweat, it also rewarded him with purpose.

  Walking along the stones, he cocked his head toward the forest and for a moment he seemed young again, feeling the cool September air on his cheeks, scanning the trees for birds. Throughout his life, Jerry was most at home when he was outside.

  * * *

  Jerry McGahan was born in the winter of 1943 in Dillon, a small railroad town in southwestern Montana. His biological father was a well-liked drunk and loose cannon named Johnny Harr. According to a story Jerry was told, Johnny once shot a black bear, ran out of shells, and then tracked it down and killed it with a hammer. Jerry’s mother, Alice, divorced Johnny when Jerry was young and moved to Livingston with her new husband, Chuck. Together they opened a restaurant called The Coffee Shop and the family lived above it, in the windowless rooms of an abandoned hotel. In one of his stories Jerry describes it as “a big, dark, hollow place.”

  Jerry was a scrawny, awkward boy with freckles and few friends, so he learned to entertain himself. He liked climbing the buildings around the hotel. On one building he found a baby pigeon, which he brought home and named Sapphire. The bird became his companion, riding on his cap when he delivered the Park County News. Jerry soon became infatuated with birds. He would borrow his mother’s car and drive to hike the sloughs and climb the cliffs of Paradise Valley, where he found marsh hawks, falcons, and great horned owls. Along the way, he suffered scrapes with rattlesnakes, badgers, coyotes, bears, and other animals. His childhood was punctuated with tetanus shots.

  When Jerry was a teenager, he and his best friend, Jay Sumner, saw a book for sale in Livingston. It was a translated copy of The Art of Falconry, the first modern zoological treatise, written in 1250 by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Jerry and Jay coveted the book, but neither of them had the twenty-five dollars to buy it. Then they caught wind that the owner of an agate shop south of town was willing to pay twenty-five dollars to anyone who could exterminate the skunks under his building. Jerry and Jay took the job.

  Knowing little about skunks, they consulted the local government trapper, who suggested they bury a fifty-gallon drum and put a swinging platform on top, baited with a rotten fish. The skunk would step out onto the platform and then—whoosh—swing down into the drum.

  Jerry and Jay rummaged through the town’s garbage piles, attracting some attention from the police, until they found a suitable drum. They cut off its top in Jay’s back yard, rigged up a platform, and found a fish. They set the trap below the agate shop and came back before school the next morning to check it. Sure enough, a big skunk hissed up at them from the bottom of the barrel. They killed it, brutally and inefficiently, with rocks and a skewer, but not before it soaked them both in sulfur. When it was dead, they fished it out of the drum and dropped it down a hole, which they learned later was the well of a church.

  After that, Jerry and Jay tried a new technique with a steel leg trap attached to a length of wire. When they caught a skunk, one of the boys would grab the wire and run, dragging it out from under the shop. Then the other boy would take aim and shoot the animal with a shotgun. They dispatched eight skunks that way, enough to satisfy the shop owner. They took his money and bought the book. Even into their adult lives, the book spent a year at Jerry’s house, and then a year with Jay. Both frien
ds developed a lifelong passion for birds of prey.

  One day in high school, Jerry found a fledgling golden eagle in a nest on a cliff outside of town. He lifted the bird out of the nest and brought it home so he could train it to hunt rabbits. He named the eagle Torrey, and he kept her in a large cage outside and fed her prairie dogs that he stored in the freezer. When Jerry went to the University of Montana in Missoula in 1961, he brought Torrey with him. She lived in an enclosure behind the gym. Jerry trained her to fly to him when he blew a referee’s whistle and swung a ball of meat in the air.

  Jerry was flying Torrey on the mountain behind campus one day while the university football team practiced on a field below. Alerted, perhaps, by the coach’s whistle, Torrey started tracking the football, then swooped, grabbed it, and perched on it near the fifty-yard line. The players all stood around her, hands on hips, maintaining a healthy distance. Jerry had to scramble down the mountain to get her off the ball before the team could resume practice. A photographer snapped a picture of the scene that appeared in the next day’s newspaper.

  Jerry was a natural student. At UM he compiled his fastidious field research into a paper about the hunting habits of golden eagles around the state. It’s still one of the most complete studies on eagles in Montana. He spent summers observing wildlife in the mountains. And he met Libby, a liberal arts major from Missoula who liked to hike as much as he did. They married in 1966, at Soldiers Chapel in Gallatin Canyon outside Bozeman, an elegant log and stone church at the foot of Lone Mountain. Jerry had driven by it one day and determined that one day he would get married there.

  That same year, Jerry finished his master’s in wildlife biology at UM. Then he and Libby moved to Madison, where Jerry got a doctorate in zoology at the University of Wisconsin. As part of his graduate research, he received a grant from the National Geographic Society to study Andean condors in South America. He and Libby spent two years in Colombia and Peru, scaling cliffs and hunkering in blinds to observe the birds. Jerry filmed a documentary and wrote a story for the May 1971 issue of National Geographic. Libby took the pictures, including the cover photograph of Jerry with a giant Andean condor perched on his arm, almost ten-feet-worth of wings flared, seemingly ready to peck off Jerry’s nose. Jerry named that condor Gronk and brought it home with him to Montana, before donating it to a zoo.

  All of this research was ample groundwork for a career in academia. Jerry was passionate about science, and as a professor he could have stoked the curiosity of another generation of wildlife biologists—but he was a reluctant teacher. When he taught his first class as a graduate student, he was so nervous that he raced through two lectures on the first day. After the bell rang, he ran back to his office to start planning more lessons.

  The grandstanding of higher education put him off, too. Ultimately, he decided that he would rather retain his freedom in obscurity than nurture a scientific reputation on a concrete-bound campus. In 1973, he returned to western Montana and settled on the river-bottom land in the little town of Arlee, on the Flathead Indian Reservation just north of Missoula. He and Libby had adopted their first child in Colombia. They named him Jay, after Jerry’s old friend Jay, who bought land and built a house just up the Jocko River from Jerry. In 1974, Jerry and Libby had a daughter named Jordan. With a new family to provide for, Jerry bought a flatbed pickup, built some hives, and started a honey business that he called Old World Honey. He kept his hives on ranchland throughout the Mission and Flathead valleys and he valued the work that busied his body but cleared his mind.

  Because Jerry spent so much time outside, birds still inhabited his days. He could identify most of them by sight or sound, and the woods around his cabin teemed with them. In spring, he dutifully recorded his first sightings of songbirds, welcoming them as friends. Over time, he taught me the songs of his favorites. When he hiked in the mountains, he listened for the olive-sided flycatcher’s jovial call, “whip three beers.” The shy Swainson’s thrush would arrive in late June, thrilling him with its ascending, fluting spiral of a song, like a garden hose spinning through the air. The incessant chatter of the catbird followed him through his summer garden chores while tiny ruby-crowned kinglets chittered at him from the treetops.

  One morning in 2010, he walked out of the cabin and heard a song he didn’t recognize. He found the bird in a bush and went back inside to consult his field guide. It was a Carolina wren. He reported the sighting to the wildlife department at the University of Montana, but they were skeptical; the Carolina wren is common in the eastern United States, but had never been seen in Montana. Until now.

  Birders drove from as far away as Oregon to add it to their “life lists.” When they arrived, brandishing spotting scopes and telephoto lenses, Jerry would stop what he was doing and introduce them to the bird.

  He paid attention to birds when he traveled, too. Later in life he spent his winters traveling with Janet, and sometimes alone, to India, Haiti, Cuba, and elsewhere. He watched for the honeyguide bird in Mali and Senegal, where he spent several weeks working with local beekeepers. And he tramped around the Guatemalan highlands searching for the resplendent quetzal while visiting Hilly, who worked there for a year after college. She remembers her father walking through the jungle, enraptured, saying things like, “Jesus, that’s a barbet! I’ve never seen a barbet before. No, wait. That’s a white-whiskered puffbird. Well, aren’t you pretty?”

  * * *

  There weren’t many birds around the afternoon that Jerry walked away from the house with his family trailing behind. It was fall, and most had flown south. Those that remained were the common ones most birders ignore—finches, chickadees, ravens, and turkey vultures. But Jerry found something to admire in every one. The way nuthatches always creep down a tree trunk. The uncanny intelligence of magpies. The way you can distinguish a pileated woodpecker’s cry from other woodpeckers because, as he put it, “it’s just a little more unhinged.”

  Jerry had a special affinity for woodpeckers. Like them, he was industrious. He was hardheaded. He was a flash of color in the monochrome woods.

  III. The Dirt

  Fall in Montana is a period of battening down. For Jerry, it was a season of closure before the dark days of winter. “Fall is chaos,” he wrote, “everything wanting attention.” There was fruit to pick and gardens to till and food to put up. But at its end, fall was the catharsis of summer, a sigh before sleep.

  By mid-September the harvest was complete in the gardens that surrounded the house. As we walked away from the porch that day in 2016 we could see that an early frost had sucked the life from the tomato plants, leaving them limp and brown, slumped against their cages. With Jerry’s guidance, Hilly and I had gouged open the potato patch with shovels, stashing the muddy reds, russets, and fingerlings in the root cellar. The cool earth lay ravished around us.

  Gardening was one of Jerry’s greatest passions. “What you love is what you keep your eye on,” he wrote in one of the dozens of short stories he published in the Georgia Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Ploughshares, and other magazines. “And that’s the trick, because what you are isn’t much more than what you think about.”

  In that case, Jerry was part plant.

  The first flower he loved was a narcissus bulb a neighbor gave him in graduate school in Wisconsin. He poked it into some pebbles inside a glass of water, set it on a windowsill, and waited. Eventually it sprouted, and then bloomed. The creamy blossom smelled like honey and lit up the house like a lantern in the melancholic mid-winter.

  When Jerry had just bought the river-bottom land in Arlee, his step-cousin Clifford, who was like an uncle and a mentor to him, gave him a Queen of Hearts dianthus. Jerry treasured it, but as he was putting the roof on the cabin he dropped a piece of lumber and crushed the plant. He felt terrible and told Clifford he couldn’t take any more plants until the house was finished.

  At that time this land was barren, gravelly, and overgrazed, but to Jerry it was a living canvas. Over the
years, he built his small honey business here and he helped raise his blended family.

  When I first met Hilly, it took me some time to understand her family tree. Jerry had the two children, Jay and Jordan, from his marriage with Libby. Janet had two sons, Simon and Duncan, with her first husband, Scot. (I was impressed to learn that Scot, his new wife Philippa, Janet, and Jerry all remained close friends.) Janet and Jerry married in 1981 beneath a willow that Jerry had planted behind the cabin. Together, they had two daughters, first Romy and then Hilly, the youngest of the six. They were both born in the cabin and, like their siblings, grew up weeding the gardens and pulling honey alongside their father.

  From the moment he got here, Jerry cultivated a sense of belonging to this land. He filled it with trees, flowers, and vegetables. Over time he became so fond of the place that it was nearly impossible to coax him from it. He went into town reluctantly, and when he attended parties he reliably slipped out early and undetected and headed for home on foot. After almost fifty years of accumulating this dirt under his fingernails, of transforming its molecules into food, there was no longer a clear separation between this land and the man himself. One smelled of the other, elemental and eternal, like smoke and leather and loam.

  When the house was built, the land around it had no topsoil. Jerry was working four jobs at the time—keeping bees, teaching biology at a local high school, conducting a biological survey of the Blackfoot River for the Nature Conservancy, and working as a state bee inspector. He didn’t have time for landscaping, but he spread sawdust around the house and scattered grass seed. When the grass took root, he mowed it and left the clippings. As years of this went by, the clippings decomposed and manufactured dirt. By the end of Jerry’s life the grass grew thickly around the cabin and the topsoil was two knuckles deep.